Jenny Saville was born in Cambridge, England in 1970. In 1990, midway through her BA course at the Glasgow School of Art, Jenny Saville exhibited in Contemporary '90 at the Royal College of Art. In 1992 she completed her degree as well as showing in Edinburgh and in Critics Choice at the Cooling Gallery, London. Following the success of her show at the Saatchi Gallery in 1994, which generated a great deal of publicity for her work (the images were ubiquitous that year), Saville went on to take part in the exhibition American Passion, which toured from the McLellan Gallery, Glasgow, to the Royal College of Art and the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut.

By 1994 many people were familiar with Saville's massive paintings, such as Plan, in which a naked woman is seen from below, her body filling the canvas through a combination of physical bulk and extreme foreshortening. Contour lines, as would demarcate the changes in altitude of land masses on a map, are drawn across the surface of the woman's skin.

Solo museum exhibitions include Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome (2005); Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida (2012); and Modern Art Oxford (2012). Her work was included in “Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection,” Royal Academy of Arts, London (1997, traveled to Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; and Brooklyn Museum of Art (1998–99); “The Nude in 20th Century Art,” Kunsthalle Emden, Germany (2002, traveled to Arken Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen, through 2003); “Painting,” Museo Correr, 50th Biennale di Venezia (2003); “Paint Made Flesh,” Frist Center for the Arts, Nashville (2009, traveled to Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; and Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, New York, through 2010); and “Eroi,” Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Torino, Italy (2011).